Mayor Larry Morrissey says he and Chief of Police Chet Epperson look forward to participating in the Winnebago County public safety summit in January.

“We’ve been talking with the county about this for some time,” Morrissey said Monday.

In addition to police and criminal justice departments, Morrissey wants to include federal agencies “in helping to partner with local police.” Federal crimes typically involve convictions featuring lengthy imprisonment, “and typically they’re shipped out to prisons across the nation.”

The city is open to the county’s idea of the sheriff patrolling outer areas of the city in high-crime periods so that city police can focus on violent crime in the city’s core.

“We’ve already been involved with some joint efforts, and we’re looking at a number of joint initiatives, including e-ticketing,” the mayor said.

The mayor says one of the city’s biggest challenges is dealing with ex-offenders. “We don’t have a problem arresting people, but we often arrest the same people over and over, and that’s an issue for courts and corrections. The young man killed in the San Jose nightclub incident was 22, he had been in and out of the state system three times with felonies, at 18, 19 and 22. And when he’s out he ends up getting involved in a violent exchange, a high-speed chase.”

The court system “has a tremendous potential to hold people accountable,” the mayor says.

Morrissey is first to acknowledge “that we (need to) get the police ranks up to (current authorized strength of) 285, and just given the number of officers on light duty, administrative leave, we’re well under that, probably at 265 to 268. Our highest authorized strength was 305, and we’re 20 off that mark, due mostly to budget constraints.”

Morrissey said that some of those budget constraints are due to the city’s agreement with the fire union, which has a “minimum manning” requirement that prevents the city from reducing the number of firefighters on duty. So, there’s less money for police.

Epperson said it’s a given that budgets of all public agencies will remain tight, “so we need to do whatever it takes, whether it’s local, state and federal government to partner.

How we’ve always done things can’t continue. Every agency has lost manpower. There has to be cooperation, dialogue, everybody putting resources together and working as a team.”

One gap that inhibits inter-agency police cooperation involves data-sharing. Cop shops have their own radio systems that may not talk to other cop shops. Not all data is freely available.

But Epperson says he’s not quite sure what Sheriff Dick Meyers means when he says the latest police department data isn’t instantly available to sheriff’s deputies. The chief says he makes data available as soon as it’s been verified for legal purposes. This can be from a couple hours to a couple days.

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When the city and county shared one records bureau in the old Public Safety Building, such information was jointly available, Epperson said. However, “if an officer wants information, they can always pick up the phone and call us.”

Other info could be shared by the county to aid police, Morrissey and Epperson say. For instance, if police stop someone and do a records check, they may find out he’s on probation but not special conditions attached to it.

“If we stop someone at 2 a.m., we may not know he’s not supposed to be with gang members, or he was supposed to be in by 10 p.m.,” Epperson said. “I don’t think there’s any intentional effort to block it by the county, though, and we are much farther ahead with county (data) than we are with getting information from the state parole system.”

One anti-gang tool is a new state law “that gives the state’s attorney power to prosecute RICO (racketeering) cases, to go after gangs’ architecture and organizational structure.

Most violent crime is one gang against another, drug deals gone bad, and innocent bystanders can become victims,” Morrissey said.”